4.29 Tuesday (Apparition of St. Cuniculus)

Culled from "Harper's Weekly Review" for April 29: "Children celebrating Easter in Richmond, Virginia, collected eggs stuffed with white-supremacist propaganda."

White supremacist

Residents in a Richmond suburb who put Easter eggs on their lawn for Easter morning noticed that their private cache had been seeded during Easter eve with alien eggs bearing messages inside like the little paper slips in fortune cookies. A bald attempt to overtake the plastic minds of children ab ovo, quite literally. 

Richmond of palmy memory was the capitol of the late and apparently lamented Confederate States and home to all sorts of nostalgic, plantation-themed nuttiness like Sons of Confederate Veterans costume galas, battle reenactments (a.k.a., a chance to get it right) and myriad opportunities to get togged out like a Confederate general.

White supremacist

What could the little missives inside the plastic eggs contain that might send a parent scrambling to wrest it from the sticky hands of a curious little seeker after God's own truth? Everyone knows that the Easter Bunny is a white rabbit. But this isn't really about Easter, it's about access to young minds. Santa is also white, but we think about Santa during a season when educational opportunities are scarcer. A dog can leave things on a lawn, but it's harder to get inside someone's house to fill the stockings with instructional materials. 

 (Ate an Easter egg)

4.28 Monday (Diminution of Agia Elisaveta)

"The Elizabeth Warrens"

This past week, on one of my endless daily drives through the Rattlesnake Belt, having reached that point of blank distraction at which even the basest form of cultural diversion would suffice, I turned on the car radio. The instant jackpot was a political talk show, the topic was banking regulation, the sympathies of guest and host alike were faith-based conservative free marketeering. 

The guest was a spent intellectual force from American Heritage Action who began reasonably enough by pointing out a shared perception that the "banking industry" has perpetrated high crimes and misdemeanors with no consequences to itself. But if anyone were hoping for a bit of home truth about rigorous new regulation or strict oversight of an institution gone haywire, the speaker quickly volunteered that he did not agree with "the Elizabeth Warrens." A palpable relief emanated over the broadband (which Miguel still thinks of as "the airwaves.")

Now I confess I was ignorant of any other Elizabeth Warren in political life or in the public notice, not to mention several of them. Who were these other Elizabeth Warrens, I wondered, that he had even heard of them, could know their views on regulation, could know of their universal agreement on the question? And why would these women, all sharing a name, necessarily agree in questions of banking policy? Isn't it at least conceivable that, of the set of all women named "Elizabeth Warren," at least one might have landed on the side of the free market angels?

Oh, Miguel (I chided myself), always too literal minded. I had at last spotted the rhetorical coup de grace, the trick of diminishing a policy or argument by reducing it to the name of its proponent (Marxism, Keynesianism), then reducing the proponent to a type; the implication is that there is not a single individual named EW, no such person exists in her own right, no one individual capable of advanced and clear thinking.

There are only "the Elizabeth Warrens," which is to imply a set of clones or nested Russian dolls or kittens, all singing the same monotonous mechanical tune without a single functioning consciousness. An ideology requiring no counterarguments.

In a more positive vein, one might speak of "the Ronald Reagans" as a single functioning consciousness.

 "The Ronald Reagans"

4.26 Saturday (Ecstasy of St. Teresa)

St. Teresa at the vending machine

From Miguel's home state of Colorado comes a further innovation in marijuana dispensaries. American Green, an enterprising vending company, has recently installed the ZaZZZ in Montana’s Smokehouse, a barbecue restaurant in Avon, the speed trap of Eagle County (this post includes a bit of news and a driver alert). 

It’s the nation’s "first marijuana edibles vending machine," explains a company officer. “Many people could look at this and say that’s just a vending machine, and they’d be right, but mostly wrong.” Which sounds very much like what you might say when you're like totally bombed, dude.

 

 A photo in case you . . . ummm, like . . . get lost.

The machine will soon be stocked with happinesses from Herbal Elements, probably wrapped in those maddening cellophane pouches that try the forearms of the strongest, the patience of the meekest, and could completely flummox an amateur stoner. Maybe herbally enhanced favorites like brownies, pretzel bits, Tootsie Rolls, "space cake," Rice Krispie treats, banananananana bread and other cannabis classics for the krispie fried set from the Stoner's Cookbook.

The Dude abides, although in a pale and attenuated way. Users of the new vending service will need a valid medical marijuana card and be verified through what the company calls the machine's "active biometrics." Still, what better place than a barbecue outlet for vending medical marijuana? The analgesic properties of cannabis are well-documented, and one prevalent source of chronic pain in America is overeating. It's a win-win, though it's named the Smokehouse, so God only knows what might go on in the rest rooms. . .

. . . or the kitchen

In another food-related note, adding to the proliferation of choices on grocery shelves is another variation on Hershey's chocolate syrup. There's the old favorite, then the special dark chocolate version, and now the "calcium" version. So what has been from childhood a reliable source of triglycerides is also an important nutritional supplement. It's like buying health care at the Piggly Wiggly. It's all good news today.

4.24 Thursday (Apotheosis of St. Cunagunda)

If only to feed my penchant for gentle raillery, our great states of Dixie have once again hoisted the banner of evangelical fervor on a truly African scale. Two recent instances of legislative zeal, the first from South Carolina, where a legislative amendment has been proposed to another bill that recently passed the state House to designate the Columbian mammoth as the state fossil. The initial bill is stalled after Republican senator Kevin Bryant added two verses from the book of Genesis. (That would be the Republican senator Kevin Bryant who posted the now famous Osama/Obama photo on his campaign website a few years back.)  

Bryant's amendment was ruled out of order, but senators rallied to debate his addendum to the bill, which adds to the original text that the mammoth was "created on the sixth day along with the beasts of the field." (Which would include dinosaurs.)

The original measure came in response to a letter to elected officials from Olivia McConnell, an-8-year-old resident, who pointed out that there is as yet no South Carolina state fossil. Funny, I always thought the state fossil was Strom Thurmond.

The great state of Mississippi, much to the premature delight of a few enlightened teachers and parents who should have seen this coming, mandated that schools now must provide a state-wide curriculum of sex education. As it happens, the state commissariat of education was neither interested in sex nor in education. A central prop in the standardized instruction is a Peppermint Pattie, which is unwrapped and handed about the room until everyone has handled it, whereupon it is displayed to a horrified classroom in all its sweatyfingered, deliquescent moral torpor. "They're using [it] to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she's had sex — that she's been used," explained an outraged parent who is also a public health worker.

No shame

I wonder what the Africans are up to these days. 

4.5 Saturday (Nativity of St. John Chrysostom)

Culled from a recent episode of Harper's "Weekly Review": "[F]ormer American president Jimmy Carter offered advice on evading government surveillance to panelists on NBC’s Meet the Press. 'When I want to communicate with a foreign leader privately,' he said, 'I type or write a letter myself, put it in the post office, and mail it.' "

 "Bit of a dustup last night I expect."

Reading this bit of sage counsel I was touched - by its commonsensical soundness, by its elegance, by its very simplicity. The day has not dawned (yet) in this country when ordinary citizens, upon retrieving their mail, find that it has the rumply appearance of having been steamed open in a government basement, redacted with a black Sharpie or pair of sharp scissors after passing under the grim scrutiny of the warden's office or some mysterious Commissariat of Domestic and International Communiqués. The facilities at the National Security Administration and its ancillary operations at Google and AT&T are all too high-tech to open envelopes and scratch things out, or even to read nonsearchable, nondigitized character matrices in fonts which, far from being uniform, are more often impressionistic at best.

I was also touched by that image of a beloved former president, seated at his wooden writing desk, a patch of Georgia sunlight falling through the study window, fountain pen in hand, a studied frown on his brow as he considers how he will begin (prolepsis), how continue (excursus), how argue or cajole, how raise up or cast low, admonish or praise. Then, folding the letter, licking the envelope and trundling off down the sidewalk with it to the local post office to buy a stamp, exchange pleasantries and how-dos with Hazel Mae the postmistress, to the soda fountain for a quick one before ambling back to Rosalind and the wire-haired terrier, Suleiman Omar ibn Rashid.

But still, something puzzled me. I thought a moment, thought again, and puzzled yet again - why would the NSA have any interest in a note to the likes of Clement Atlee, John Major, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Linda Ronstadt, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, Yitzak Rabin, Imelda Marcos, Pope John Paul II, Strom Thurmond, Everett Dirkson, Claire Booth Luce, President Sukarno, Robert McNamara, Ralph Abernathy, Shimon Peres, Harold Stassen, Konrad Adenauer, Betty Friedan, John Maynard Keynes, George Kennan, Shirley Chisholm, Thich Nhat Hanh, Averill Harriman, Anwar Sadat, Nelson Rockefeller, Adlai Stevenson, William O. Douglas, Wendell Wilkie, Menachim Begin, Martin Buber, John Foster Dulles, Dean Acheson, Alger Hiss, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Zbigniew Brzinski or Racquel Welch?

Well, it beats me. But like he says, it pays to be careful.

4.4 Friday (Feast of Torquemada)

 

 Your tax dollars at work

Congress has ordered the release of a report on the CIA's 'enhanced interrogation' techniques, a document which to no one's astonishment does not redound to the honor of the agency. Saxby  Chambliss (R-Absurdistan), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee (I will not stoop to pick the low fruit in that phrase) is already whingeing that the report is biased, distorted and relies for its gobsmack on 'cherry picking.'  Nonetheless, urges the Hon. Senator, it should be released anyway so that 'the American people can make up their own minds.'

This last, of course, is the soapy sanctimony of cant. When Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were huddling with John Yoo to refine the extralegal notion of enhanced interrogation, you can bet that neither Saxby nor any of his Congressional colleagues was informed of anything that could have helped them to 'make up their own minds.' Nor was that sacrosanct fiction, 'the American people,' ever asked what they thought at the time.

Saxby is no Pericles, but must political speech always be the sort of disingenuous drivel that only the viewers of 'Duck Dynasty' can hear without gagging?

To make matters more trying, I came across a magazine lying on my cocktail table, evidently left there by a soul of a more rarified bent than mine. It was a New Age-y literary/media/art photog production of unpredictable and irregular valence; on its inside cover, the various 'contributors' each supplied a brief precis of themselves, a thumbnail to help the subscribing public understand who they think they are and where they think they're 'coming from.' It was instructive and humbling.

The first one off the mark says that 'after years of having stumbled down long corridors of philosophical mystery, he has learned that spaghetti can make you happy." (This is from the  Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten school of hastily acquired wisdom, generally bleeding over into the glib smart-assery of the unschooled. It will surprise no one to learn that the first word of this author's contribution is 'I'.)

The next contributor notes that she 'recently married the woman she's essentially been married to for thirty years.' (Is being 'essentially married' different in some important respect from just being married - more authentic, more fun, less expensive? Is this merely self-congratulatory or will it contribute to our understanding of her written opus?)

Yet a third notes that his teenage son 'has recently discovered he's a spoken-word poet' whom you can watch on YouTube, depending on how much you figure your time is worth. (Which begs the question what sort of poet this prodigy may have been before his discovery that he was a 'spoken-word poet.' I presume it means that he just starts talking without writing anything down beforehand, which seems more an affliction of adolescence than an art form. This is what gives New Age-ism a bad name, this fudging of artistic categories - are there, for example, poets in farina, feces, pharmaceuticals or any other medium? News to old Miguel.)

A fourth (I'm merely taking these in order of appearance and they each in turn set a new standard of fey) is 'an adoptive parent to the monarch caterpillars that metamorphose into butterflies on his patio.' What more could one add to this coy neo-Romanticism?

"Think what you like, mate, you're not me dad!"

 

A fifth, 'along with every third person he meets, is working on a novel. His goal is to spend more time on writing than he does on fantasy baseball and the stock market.' (This seems to be one of those 'three-legged stool' financial plans that money advisers recommend so lushly. Consider the genius of it - a three-pronged scheme for financial success, every prong guaranteed to fail.)

There were more, but I was too exhausted to persist, feeling (as I was) the weight of my own prosaic drabness. Still, I felt grateful not to be a writer and so under no obligation to limn the trackless wastes of the 'I'. Any way you want to take it, the power of speech is at best a mixed blessing.

4.3 Thursday (St. Bernard's Day)

A dog where it belongs

Periodically I stray from the palmy precincts of the chateau and go down among the neighboring peasantry to outrage it by complaining about its dogs. Nearly everyone owns at least one such animal, and they all, to a man or woman, regard it as a 'pet' rather than as a (more fashionably democratic) 'companion.' This may seem a fine point, but it has wider legal implications: a 'companion' is possessed of rights in its own person, viz., the right of uncontrolled and pointless barking; a 'pet' on the other hand is chattel, and as such has no rights, while its owner has the unconditional right to allow the animal to bark perpetually and without purpose. My complaints, then, are taken as an attempt to trammel a human right, not merely a right extended by courtesy or regard to another species.

So, as I say, I am forced by circumstance to shoulder unwillingly the mantle of civilization and totter out on a quixotian errand. My years of knight-errantry on this particular fool's errand have taught me that the sprawling cowtown in which I reside has loaded the dice against the man who would live in peace and solitude, and in favor of the flea-and-tick brigade. A man may file a noise complaint free of charge, so to speak, and the offending dog owner will receive a warning. Subsequent complaints require at least one witness resident at another address, or a video "ten minutes or longer" of the lathered and yapping animal. ("Ten minutes - seriously?" I asked, to which the official did not deign a reply.)

Now, a video of that length would require a camera which I have no wish to own, require the considerable directorial skills of a flea circus impresario, not to mention the stealth of a Navy SEAL, in the execution. But, as I have also discovered, it is by far the easier alternative; a willing witness is impossible to come by.

It should be obvious that a code of omerta is implicit among the dog owners of any neighborhood, a sort of 'golden rule' of complicity: I'll never complain about your yapper and you'll never complain of my barker. If any third party (like the old crank at the chateau) should raise a demur, we will unfailingly close ranks on the question though we may despise one another on nearly every other point of humanity. 

What is not immediately obvious is how far this understanding has reached its tentacles into the larger society. It has formed a network of unbroachable silence that extends even to those unencumbered in their own households by the canine thrall. It is, by now, an essential thread in the social fabric.

I had engaged the consent of a near neighbor (one whom I have considered a friend of many years) to witness my recent complaint of a party keeping a roisterous kennel in their backyard, just beneath the belvidere above the north lawn of the chateau. His curiosity invariably leads him, in some destructive, technology-enabled spiral, to the internet, where he discovers from the city assessor's database that the owner of the property in question is his next door neighbor, and that the tenant about whom I have complained is this man's near of kin.

Now, as the owner of the property himself keeps a pack of noisy dogs, he has been a longstanding source of irritation to my friend, who I will call Lorenzo. But Lorenzo has, for the past quarter-century, harbored dreams of refurbishing his residence to the point of putting some sheet rock over his naked wall joists and adding an outbuilding or two on the property, all of which would require him to get a building permit from the city. And getting a building permit would require him to notify all the neighbors within a stated perimeter and, should there be objections, submit to a public hearing of his petition.

In short, Lorenzo spied a possible snag in his plans, decided not to give any possible or imagined ground of offense to his dog-owning neighbor, and (even though Lorenzo himself has no dog) to slink off in uncomplaining silence, withholding his testimony, offering neither aid nor succor. It is a tale older than time and sadder than humanity.